sImply to express scorn for the Clinton Administration, and that is what he and his main advisers did. Clinton had per- ilously weakened the milital)T. Clinton had engaged in hopelessly idealistic and doomed efforts at "nation-building" (a word Bush uttered with a sour-lemon downturn of the mouth) in RussIa, Haiti, Somalia, and the Balkans. Clinton had tried to do too many things and lacked (another favorite Bush word, but de- livered reverently) "humility." Clinton always seemed to be running for the Nobel Peace Prize. His manner was too adolescent, not steely enough. He was too political and too irresolute, regularly allowing domestic pressure groups to push him off one or another declared diplomatic COUIse. The foreign-policy establishment, in- cluding the Democratic division, has never been crazy about Clinton's perfor- mance, or about the performances of his chief diplomatic advisers, so these criti- cisms found a receptive audience. (Prob- ably the most eloquent statement of the Bush critique of Clinton's foreign policy predates the Bush campaign, and is found in a 1996 article called "Foreign Policy as Social Work," by a disillusioned Demo- cratic Friend of Bill named Michael Mandelbaum.) The lengthiest descrip- tion of the Bush foreign-policy position, an article in the January/February; 2000, issue of Foreign Affairs by Condoleezza Rice about what "American foreign policy in a Republican Administration" might be like, is much more ringing in its anti-Clinton passages ("devastating. . . extraordinary neglect . . . happy talk") than in its prescriptive ones. A s satisfying as the Clinton-bashing may have been, however, it is al- ready clear that Bush won't be able to make foreign policy simply by undoing what he thinks Clinton did wrong. Un- derneath the rhetoric about devastation and hollowing out, there is not a very big disagreement over how large the defense budget should be, as there was twenty years ago, when Reagan took office. The United States is not currently involved in a lot of nation-building ef- forts that Bush can now end. Aid to Russia is relatively low, and so are troop levels in Haiti and the Balkans. Bush can and probably will cease the practice of Presidential summitry in the Mideast and Korea, but there aren't many places from which the United States, with mil- itary spending quinmple any other coun- try's and with legitimate interests all over the globe, can actually disengage. Nor does abjuring nation-building easily suggest a solution to any of the most serious foreign-policy problems that are going to present themselves to Bush. Assuming that Clinton doesn't come up with a last-second deal, Bush has to decide what to do about the Israeli- Palestinian negotiations. He has to find a way to revive the World Trade Organi- zation. He has to decide how much money to devote to missile defense, and, ill the process, how much he is willing to shrug off the views of other countries, practically none of which like the idea of OUI having it. In some cases, Bush has to operate under special Republican pres- sures that didn't affect Clinton very much. Perhaps Clinton's greatest, bravest unalloyed triumph in foreign poucywas bailing out Mexico in its debt crisis, in 1995-but there is strong sentiment in Bush's party for abolishing the Interna- tional Monetary Fund and scaling back the project of international debt relief: A business coalition called USA-Engage is pressing for the abolition of economic sanctions against some anti-American regimes (Iran, for example); Bush can't make that call without making either business or the right angry. Probably the single most dangerous place in the world is the Taiwan Strait. (The second most dangerous is Kashmir, on the India-Pakistan border.) Taiwan has been functionally independent for decades, but China still officially consid- ers it to be Chinese territof)T. Corporate Republicans see China as the world's most promising emerging market; Chris- tian and anti-Communist Republicans want to punish China for its human- rights violations and to tilt toward Tai- wan. If the Taiwan-independence party; which recently came to power there, ac- tually declares independence, or if the Chinese economy SOUIS and the regime turns to anti - T aiwanism as a way to rally an unhappy populace, China could go after Taiwan militarily; either by sabre- rattling or by a direct attack, which would be incalculably worse. That situa- tion would have the potential to escalate to nuclear war, and Bush would have to try to defuse it: a project with the highest possible stakes, requiring great political and diplomatic skill. Having decided not to be quixotically overambitious about solving the world's problems won't do much good in Taiwan; it is a problem that we have no choice but to confront. W hat does Colin Powell think about all these questions? That is hard to say; because Powell doesn't have an extensive set of published views on foreign polic)T. In fact, nobody whom Bush has appointed so far has a real reputation as a strategist, in the manner of Henry Kissinger, in the Nixon Ad- ministration, or Zbigniew Brzezinski, in the Carter Administration. Bush pre- fers can -do administrators to intellec- tuals, and that's what he has got. Powell is immensely authoritative and charis- . " I d " mahe-- can comman any room, one foreign-policy maven quoted Powell as matter-of-factly telling him-and he is the only foreign-policy figure with a popular political constituency: But the famous "Powell doctrine," under which we commit troops only in cases where we have a clearly defined mission, over- whelming superiority; and an exit strat- egy; is really more the standard bureau- cratic position of the Pentagon in the post- Vietnam era than a foreign policy: Twenty years ago, when Caspar Wein- berger was Secretary of Defense and Powell was his unknown military assis- tant, Weinberger's doctrine was, essen- tially; the Powell doctrine-neoconserv- atives used to call Weinberger "Gandhi with guns." Now Powell runs a depart- ment that likes to intervene, and he will undoubtedly be sensitive to a charge that as the first black Secretary of State he failed to try to stop genocidal regimes in A.fi1ca. The Powell doctrine doesn't work very well as a template for Secretary of State Powell. Condoleezza Rice, like Powell, has a lot of presence, and is charming, brisk, efficient, and a master briefer. Because she is nominally an academic, she has produced more published work than Powell, so she is easier to categorize. She presents herself as a Kissinger-style great-power realist, who believes that the United States should operate strictlyac- cording to calculations of its national in- terest, always dealing with other nations from a rational rather than a reformist position. "Russiàs economic future is now THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 22, 2001 37